Good Enough Governance: Poverty Reduction and Reform in Developing Countries

Abstract

The good governance agenda is unrealistically long and growing longer over time. Among the multitude of governance reforms that "must be done" to encourage development and reduce poverty, there is little guidance about what's essential and what's not, what should come first and what should follow, what can be achieved in the short term and what can only be achieved over the longer term, what is feasible and what is not. If more attention is given to sorting out these questions, "good enough governance" may become a more realistic goal for many countries faced with the goal of reducing poverty. Working toward good enough governance means accepting a more nuanced understanding of the evolution of institutions and government capabilities; being explicit about trade-offs and priorities in a world in which all good things cannot be pursued at once; learning about what's working rather than focusing solely on governance gaps; taking the role of government in poverty alleviation seriously; and grounding action in the contextual realities of each country.

Energy Landscapes and Environmentality: Boundaries between Discourses and Practices in Energy Governance

“…Innovative governance often implies the emergence of non-state market-driven arrangements, as highlighted by Cashore [5] and Swyngendouw [6]. Those arrangements however may evolve into authoritarian forms with low legitimacy and low society engagement, in an opposite way of good governance systems [7].…”

Editorial

“…Finally, it is important to highlight that more sophisticated strategies to fight poverty require the strengthening of bureaucratic capacities and/or good governance (Grindle, 2004). However, strategies that are usually considered inseparable from "good governance" -such as reducing corruption, improving accountability, effective decentralization policies, better management of public resources, structure and quality of public bureaucracy -do not always impact positively on the strategies used to fight poverty.…”

The Dynamics of Centralized Procurement Reform in a Decentralized State: Evidence and Lessons from Indonesia

“…A central focus of recent literature on policy reform is on leadership and how leadership contributes to positive macro-economic, political and organizational outcomes and public goods provision (Ahlquist and Levi, 2011;Grindle, 2007Grindle, , 2004. For example, from an analysis of eight controlled case comparison in Indonesia, which includes 1,000 business surveys and 120 interviews, von finds that the quality of government leadership plays a central role in driving the quality of policy outcomes.…”